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On Angels and Messengers

Friday, April 30, 2010

Does the turtle envy the birdfor its ability to fly?No more than the bird envies the fishfor its effortless swimming.Does that fish envy the amphibious frog for being equally at home in two different worlds?No more than the frog, the fish and the bird envy the turtle for its invulnerability.And so it goes; for all creatures were given special talents that define their individuality.Most of them never complain.

Find your gifts. Some are well hidden.Open them and use them. Make them shine.Say "Thank You!", even if you hear no applause.Others may envy you, though this might surprise you.Chances are, they are none other than those you regarded as more gifted than yourself.Consider the turtle.

THIS SITE IS NOT THE OFFICIAL ONE. THE RESULTS OF THE 2010 CONTEST ARE NOW POSTED ONBULWER-LYTTON.COM .'MID-JUNE' ARRIVED A BIT EARLIER THAN EXPECTED: ON THE 28TH!MY ENTRIES WILL BE FOUND HERE -- AND ONLY HERE. THAT MEANS THEY WERE TOO GOOD TO WIN. BUMMER!

I INTEND TO WIN THE CONTEST BEFORE I DIE --SO IT LOOKS LIKE I'LL HAVE TO STICK AROUND ANOTHER YEAR. IF YOU DECIDE TO STICK AROUND, TOO, PLEASE PERUSE MY ENTRIES BELOW,AND PERHAPS SOME POETRY, SILLY AND SERIOUS --

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, conceived by Prof. Rice of the English Department at San Jose State University, is an annual literary competition that welcomes “wretched writers”. The objective is simply (editor's paraphrase)to compose the first sentence of the worst of all possible novels. Check it out: http://Bulwer-Lytton.com . If you have a sense of humor that’s slightly askew, it just might get a little askewier. The contest was inspired by this classic opening sentence by George Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford.

"It was a dark and stormy night and the rain fell in torrents -- except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Until 2010, the only time I entered was in 2002 -- when I was surprised to be deemed the runner-up in the Detective Category for this little gem of a sentence, which I really didn’t think was particularly good:

Detective Driscoll had fallen off the wagon like a frozen turkey from a Goodwill helicopter and, like a talking elephant reunited with his old circus buddies after 50 years, he reminisced about the most memorable collars of his career -- and he guffawed so hard that he fell off the bar-stool like another turkey from another helicopter as he recollected the time he arrested a mime for shoplifting and had to say “You have a right to remain silent . . .

I received congratulatory email from Finland, from Australia, and from points in between. After an eight year sabbatical, I entered the 2010 contest with the following carefully crafted crappy compositions. As you can see, once you're in the swing, it's awfully hard to stop.

SCIENCE FICTION

SF-1 The Galactic Armistice was signed in blue blood and the Little Green Boys, who were too small to fight, were sweating slime, having heard that their fathers would soon be returning in defeat -- and after Vinny, the boy they called “Smarty-Pants”, realized that since they were green, and their mothers were Little Yellow Women, it could only mean one thing, and a rather scary one at that: “Oh God! No! Daddy is a violent blood-thirsty Smurf, bigger than me ~ and now, after just getting whooped, he’s black and blue and he's coming this way!”

SF-2 The handsome but histrionic, nebbishy yet narcissistic, sexy though celibate, pompous and puritanical Starship Commander had just resisted -- well, at least he thinks he successfully resisted -- a seduction attempt by a nubile nympho-maniacal virgin, actually an attractive adolescent organic android -- well, at least the hologram of a vivacious voluptuous vamp, a vision that was custom-made from specifications in the Commander’s own lascivious imagination and given this mischievous little mission: To chase the chaste and leave them with no memory of being caught.

SF-3 The engineer had just said “I kenna do it, Captain!” (whatever that means), when the starship “Booby-Prize” hesitated momentarily, like a thoroughbred rearing up in anticipation of the bell -- well, more like the Roadrunner -- you know, the cartoon one with the whirling feet, just before he streaks off in a cloud of dust like a thoroughbred … well, more like the starship at the end of the last book in this series, because this is a recap, except for the part about the horse and the bird.

DETECTIVE

D-1

The once-beautiful girl fell into his arms like a corpse from a closet, except that instead of this being a real closet, it was an armoire, you know, a wardrobe like the one you inherited from your grandmother and you really like a lot but don’t have a need or a good place for (because your house is newer and has lots of closets, thus less wall space) but you have to keep forever because it belonged to your grandmother, who could be inside the damn thing, for all you know.

D-2 The facts of the case were not in dispute, but the Grand Jury just wasn’t convinced that a crime had been committed at the mortuary on Bring-Your-Kid-To-Work Friday, after the psychiatrists split on whether “necrophilately” is a hobby or a mental illness; while the DA argued that any creep, even a minor, caught in the act of sticking postage stamps on dead people ought to be held accountable somehow.

D-3Little ChuckyCheez had whizzed down to the market on his skateboard to get what his mother said was “the usual amount of beef for my Halloween stew”, but the regular butcher,Wally Wood, was out with the Swine Flu and the trouble started when the two new guys, Michael Myers and Ward Cleaver, Jr. (the brother who lived in Beaver’s attic), started to argue about how much chuck Wood would cut Chuck if Wood could cut Chuck chuck.

D-4At the crime lab, Grissom was giving a lunchtime seminar ~ a color-slide presentation on forensic entomology, determining the age of a decaying corpse by the sequence of bugs feeding on it, starting with those eager-beaver Blow Flies, followed by feisty Flesh Flies, slightly tardy Dermestid Beetles, fashionably late Mites, and eventually (3+ years post mortem) the Nobody-called-me-to-dinner Beetles ~ when Newman says to the new guy, way too loud, “Hey! If you’re not gonna eat your raisins …”

CHILDREN’S BOOK

Boys and girls, you must be very excited ~ but please don’t pee in your pants or shriek in a penetratingly high-pitched 200-decibel tone like that little turd did yesterday at the supermarket when his mother, who already had 43 items in the 7-Items-or-Less express line, refused to buy candy ~ yes, very excited indeed to be reading this long-awaited first edition of “Goofy Goes to Gitmo” by Yours Truly, the author of the profusely illustrated winner of the coveted Publisher's Overstock Award, "A Child's Treasury of Medieval Torture Techniques".

ROMANCE

R-1Kevin, a lonely zoologist gazing gloomily through a potted Ficus at the Omaha airport, finally found his dream girl ~ a natural beauty with the eyes of a lemur, nose of an aardvark, lips of an orangutan, teeth of a warthog, hair of a tarantula, figure of a flounder, legs of a turtle, fragrance of a musk-ox, IQ of a ‘possum, and the personality of a tapeworm; but now he’s heart-broken to learn that she also has the ovaries of a rabbit and the attention-span of a cabbage moth and she’s leaving for Guatemala with Jim Fowler to film an intimate mud-wrestling scene for Wild Kingdom.

R-2(belated entry for 2010 or early entry for 2011)All the forest creatures, small and great, held their furry or feathery breath as Prince Franklin hovered timorously over the nubile, Caucasian waif who was still asleep on her mossy bed despite thunder and lightning, and -- with his trembling, noble hands descending like timid parachutes toward her tranquil, tender, ‘snow-white’ bosom (actually it’s slightly off-white, yet still virginal) -- he nimbly activated the paddles and yelled “Clear!”, which scared the droppings out of all the forest creatures, small and great.

HISTORICAL FICTION

Fourteen-year-old Prince Dwayne was as quiet as a limpet, hiding behind the drapery in the castle library, where it was moldy as forgotten Limburger for it was damp as an October morning on the moor, and he was eaves-dropping on his strumpet of a step-mother, Queen Grenadier, supine on the divan, again, teasing Sir Lancealittle about his well-deserved name.

PURPLE PROSE (Excessively Flowery)

Seymour squinted at the booklet through his hefty spectacles and haltingly discerned the following instructions: “Hearty congratulations are bestowed upon you or your benefactor for the sagacious purchase of the finest product ever manufactured in Malaysia, which will now be personally consummated by your fastidious assembly of the 873 miniscule pieces that you behold in the carton, unless, of course, one of our pre-pubescent or illiterate production-line workers has concealed a lapse in ability to keep pace and jettisoned some of your pieces into the carton of the next unit to glide by on our state-of-the-art conveyor belt."

WESTERN

Cowboy Bob, who should have known not to mix whiskey and milk, was ashamed and embarrassed to find himself upstairs at the Sundown Saloon after the Wednesday night karaoke contest, with Miss Lola Palooza, a multi-talented “showgirl”, who declared impatiently yet somehow still sultrily, “I don’t mind the ventriloquism dummy ~ in fact he’s kind of fun ~ but, Cowboy Bob, you gotta jettison the spurs and the ukulele!”

GENERAL CATEGORY

GC-1After the meeting, Bill started to get an inkling that he had disclosed a bit too much about the planned merger, when the CEO crushed the elevator’s plastic stop-button, jerked Bill’s necktie up until he was tippy-toe like a 4’10” ballerina trying to stow overhead luggage, and whispered (odoriferously) into Bill’s nose through clenched, cigar-stained teeth: “Now that the genie has left the barn and the cat has been rung, how do you propose to get the cruddy toothpaste out of the cow’s bag and into the stupid bottle that spilled the milk on the damn beans? … Huh, Billy-Boy?”

GC-2“What up?”, inquired Beauregard.

GC-3 (or VILE PUN)Sister Marie Claire Voyante, a perceptive teacher and far-sighted visionary, revealed to her pupils the spectacular discovery that the eyeglasses she thought she lost on C Street had miraculously appeared on top of her refrigerator, so she vowed to put bouquets of irises beneath every statue of St. Seymour in the diocese, but couldn’t find even one, so she went to the Holy See and made a spectacle of herself protesting that St. Seymour was obviously conspicuous by his absence and, besides, she didn’t see why there were no statues of any saints wearing eyeglasses.

GC-4 (or VILE PUN)At the Awards Banquet in San Diego, all the literati, including last year’s winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, are strutting around like roosters in recycled prom dresses and rented tuxedos, or is it “tuxedoes”, or perhaps “tuxedi”, in which case one of those little pieces of colored paper falling from the rafters is a “confetto”, when a nervous chicken prematurely jumps out of the cake and the flustered maitre d’, Vincenzo, grabs a myopic English professor by the suspenders and asks, “Which one of these so-called writers gets the Pullet Surprise”?.

GC-5Bubba, the understudy for the role of Hamlet, moaning in pain, walked around the dressing room like a knock-kneed flamingo in the tights usually worn by Derwin, the diminutive flu-stricken principal, who then crawled into the room, shivering like a slug in green jello, and quickly diagnosed the problem, as he pointed unapologetically at the bulge that makes the schoolgirls giggle, and immortalized a line from his soliloquy (Act III, Scene 1): “Ah! There’s the rub!”

GC-6She lay on the floor, as motionless as a flounder on a bridgein the late afternoon sun, except that her lips (which werestill as plump as a nervous blow-fish) were moving feebly, so I bent down like a heron stalking minnows (well, more like a flamingo except that I'm not pink and they don't eat minnows, do they?) and she whispered softly in my ear, “Cats don’t care if you fart, you know, and dogs probably like it, but if you’re sitting in the aquarium, it sure scares the crap out of the fish”, then she died.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

We choose our path and pack our own duffel,
mostly with stuff that's not worth its weight;
and we set out on our own private odyssey --
or perhaps we wait for a ship that never comes.

Though never quite sure where we are going,
we are guided by Wisdom bought with pain
and by a gift of Grace, which somehow appears,
perhaps delivered by a prophet, or just by a friend.

The Cloud of Unknowing hides some distractions
and we suddenly recall what we've known all along:
that Being Loved is the place we have been longing for;
and Loving is the only way that will surely get us there.

When we're singing in the chorusthe director stands before uslooking like he wants to grab us by our throats.Our heads are buried in the scorealthough we've sung this song before.We're not together ... but we're singing all the notes.

The harshest critic is usually the Judge within you taking over the task begun by your parents.Perhaps it’s time to send that judge down the road – and to exile the Judge’s soul-mate, the Victim --that pin-cushion Martyr, with arrows by the hundreds sticking into him or her from all angles.

Do you set higher standards for yourself than you do for others? Isn’t that Vanity? Why be so slow to forgive yourself for making errors, when you would so quickly forgive a friend?Do you think you can achieve Perfection? If so, you’ve already made one big mistake.

Accept the fact that the Road to Perfection has not been completed -- nor will it ever be.Check all your baggage except for one knapsack, then tear up the ticket and travel light.Let the Judge and Victim trudge toward Perfection, while you head toward Fulfillment instead.

Your Garden

Peer into a mirror as if it were a window looking out on a garden.Then step outside into that garden and just admire it for a while. Now you may look around for weeds, but go slowly and carefully with the hoe.

Every new sprout is not an evil alien invader on a mission to choke your petunias.Welcome some wildflowers, like Spontaneity and at least a little Risk.Trust Helen Keller -- “Life is a daring adventure or nothing. Security is mostly a superstition. ”

Take time often to water your garden, but not with a fire hose.Compassion is a persistent shower, but a gentle one --Enough to wash the dust from the leaves and refresh the thirsty roots.

Now go somewhere else and do something different.Come back in the morning light to see how well the garden grew during the night --Simply because you turned it over and left it alone -- trusting that all would be well. It is.

An Earworm for You

“Has anybody here -- seen a judge and a victim? Can you tell me where they hide?”“I thought I saw them trudgin’ Down the road to Perfection, with Anger, a Martyr, and Pride.”

A Gift of Verse for Each of My Sopranos(except the one that married me)_________________________________

A lovely little lady named Annewas wed to a very tall man.Whenever they dance,she holds onto his pants,and her legs move as fast as they can._________________________________

Debbie came up from Long Isle-and she always dresses in style.So when she goes out,men whistle and shout.She ignores them, hiding a smile._________________________________

There’s another soprano named Ellie.Her older sister is Kelley.Like her twin sister Katie,She turned into a lady,After putting her mother through hell-y. _________________________________

Here’s to Elizabeth F_____.Her blouse is a little bit green-y.She’s as pretty can be,Though she’s got a bum knee.Anne and Lisa she sits in between-y _________________________________

A beautiful dyslexic sopronadeveloped a case of dysphonia.She couldn’t sing for a while.She’d just stand there and smile.So we called her our Lisa Mona.__________________________________

She says it's Reh-NAY, not Reh-KNEE,But it looks like Reh-KNEE to me.Although she can't spell,She sings very well.She can even hit a high C.__________________________________Let’s not forget Kathy D_______.She’s the County’s kindest pet owner.Every poor creature that straysShows up on her doorstep -- and stays.On the bed, all the others move over.__________________________________

My poor cat's relentless scratchingis a message he's dispatchingthat he cannot find a vacant spot to poop.It's only seven-thirtybut the litter box is dirty !I've looked everywhere but I can't find the scoop.So first I give the box a shakewith fervent hope that this will makethe buried treasure rise up to the surface.As I pluck each little nuggetand I drop it in the bucketI'm grateful that my life now has a purpose.